Science News

A novel twist on the young field of optogenetics may provide a new way to study living human brains as well as offering innovative therapeutic uses. --

When scientists looked at Mars through early telescopes, they saw a fuzzy, rust-colored globe scored by mysterious dark gashes some believed were alien canals. Later, armed with sharper images, we scoffed at such naivet�...

The oldest Neanderthal DNA was extracted from a human skeleton discovered buried in an Italian cave and may be up to 170,000 years old. The finding suggests the mysterious "Altamura Man" was indeed a Neanderthal.

Sleep problems are common in members of the military, and treating sleep issues early may reduce the risk of developing mental health conditions.

A healthy woman developed a relentless burning feeling in her mouth that stumped doctors and dentists for months before its strange cause was found.

Amazon has won approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to begin testing delivery drones in the United States.

The plague bacterium behind the Black Death is creeping through the grasslands of the US, irrevocably changing the landscape and ecosystem

President Obama has thrown his support behind a proposed bill that would ban so-called gay conversion therapy. But why is this treatment considered harmful?

A UNSW-led research team has encoded quantum information in silicon using simple electrical pulses for the first time, bringing the construction of affordable large-scale quantum computers one step closer to reality.

Smartphones have sensors that can detect a lurch in one direction – and such movement logged by many people at once might signal a seismic shift

Two hundred years after the biggest volcanic blast in recorded history, scientists have ranked the countries most at risk of another deadly eruption.

Here are the countries most at risk of a deadly volcanic eruption, according to an international team of experts known as the Global Volcano Model network.

Simple, translucent comb jellies have unique neuronal chemistry - and the discovery has scientists arguing over whether or not neurons evolved twice

From predictions of nuclear "breakout" to monitoring "sneak out," scientific expertise is central to the success of the preliminary accord --

This Wrangler isn't stuck, because Jeeps are awesome off-road. This is a handy trick I've had to use a few times, primarily because of my obsession with driving in places where I probably shouldn't.Back when I had a Jeep...

The Large Hadron Collider has beaten its own world record for accelerating particles. Around midnight last night, engineers at CERN broke a world record when they accelerated a beam of particles to 6.5 trillion electronv...

The factories of the future got their start in a petri dish.

New geologic evidence suggests the Isthmus of Panama emerged from the sea up to 15 million years ago, millions of years earlier than thought.

The influence of dark energy on big empty patches in space could aid us in understanding the expansion of the universe - and predicting its ultimate fate

DARwIn-OP, which stands for Dynamic Anthropomorphic Robot with Intelligence-Open Platform, recently visited the National Science Foundation to participate in a video interview while he was in town for a National Robotics...

One of the back bones from the important early human comes from a baboon - a surprising discovery for such a well-studied primate fossil

Researchers at The University of Manchester have made a significant breakthrough in the development of synthetic pathways that will enable renewable biosynthesis of the gas propane. This research is part of a programme o...